1. Technical Field
Aspects of the present invention relate to a network system in which a plurality of network devices are connected together to be capable of communicating with one another and the network devices are capable of sharing and handling image data in a particular format held by at least one of the network devices.
2. Related Art
A great number of network systems have been constructed in recent years for various purposes and in various configurations. For example, there has been proposed a network system interconnecting a plurality of electrical home appliances by a LAN (Local Area Network) and sharing image data in a particular format among the appliances, as described in Takamichi Gou, et al. “Network Home appliances—New Type of Home appliances”, Doshisha University Intelligent Systems Design Laboratory (Dec. 1, 2005) on the Internet <URL: http://mikilab.doshisha.ac.jp/dia/research/report/2005/0905/001/report20050905001.html> (browsed on Jan. 20, 2006).
In a technique proposed in Japanese Patent Provisional Publication No. HEI 08-329058 (hereinafter referred to as JP HEI 8-329058A), when a printer font not stored in a network-compatible printing device is designated by print data that is transmitted from a network device to the printing device via a network (in a network system including network devices and the printing device connected together by the network to communicate data), the printing device transmits a query to a font server in which all printer fonts to be used by the network devices on the network have been registered, receives a printer font corresponding to the printer font specified by the query, and executes the printing of the print data by use of the received printer font.
Numbers of technical proposals are being made in regard to network systems as mentioned above with the rapid progress and expansion of system networking in recent years. Consequently, vast amounts of information, which used to be printed on print media such as paper and managed in the form of print media, are stored in network devices forming a network system as electronic data in a prescribed format, and any user of a network device sharing the network system is capable of handling such data stored in other network devices as shared data at any time.
However, when such a user actually uses such data electronically managed in the network system, the user in many cases uses the information represented by the data by printing out the information as in the past, not by viewing the information displayed on a display screen, etc.
According to the above technique of JP HEI 8-329058A, even when the printing device does not have a printer font specified by font information contained in print data (object of printing), a font server can be provided independently of the network system (for example, provided exclusively for the printing device so as to communicate with the printing device only) and the printing device can carry out the printing of the print data by use of a printer font held by the font server.
However, implementation of the above technique requires that a font server should be provided specially, for which modification of the already-constructed network system becomes necessary.